Gallows Hill (24 page)

Holding Sarah by her wrists, Eric and Bucky pulled her across the frozen ground to the fire. The chill of the night sliced through her thin sweater as if it were made of gauze, and she welcomed the heat that was generated by the flames.

Debbie Rice threw her arms around Danny Adams and began to sway to the music.

"Dance with me, baby!" she crooned.

"Hey!" Jennifer shouted. "Hands off! Just because your sister snagged your boyfriend doesn't give you the right to start hitting on my guy!"

Bucky jerked Sarah abruptly out of Eric's grip and crushed her against his chest, stomping his mammoth feet in time to the beat. His breath on her face was rancid with the stench of beer. Sarah suddenly realized that all of them, with the possible exception of Kyra and Eric, had been drinking heavily. She attempted to twist away from Bucky, but it was like trying to free herself from the grip of Gargantua.

"That's real music!" Kyra shouted at her over the din. "Not that creepy stuff you listen to!"

"What does she listen to?" Leanne asked. "I'd like to hear some witch music!"

"It just so happens that I brought some tapes with me," Kyra told her. She knelt by the tape player, and a moment later the nasal vocals of the country-western group had been replaced by the rhythmic crash of ocean waves breaking on the beach at Big Sur, accompanied by the lilt of bird calls and woodwinds.

"So that's where my tapes went!" Sarah cried accusingly. "You stole them from my room!"

"Our room!" Kyra reminded her. "It's my room, too, remember?" She adjusted the volume to its highest level, and Debbie began to sway back and forth in a dance of her own.

"Let's get going with the trial!" Debbie cried as she undulated to the hypnotic beat of the music. "I proclaim Sarah Zoltanne guilty of witchcraft! What say the jury?"

As Debbie spoke, Sarah felt her arms jerked behind her back and quickly secured there with something thin and strong that cut harshly into her skin.

"You can't do that!" Kyra objected. "It's going to leave marks! I can't tell my dad this didn't happen if she goes home with marks on her!"

Bucky laughed. "What makes you think she's going to go home?" His muscular arms tightened around Sarah as he effortlessly lifted her off her feet and carried her around to the far side of the fire. And that was when she saw it, stark in the flickering firelight, the same dreadful structure as the one in the sketch that had been left in her locker.

It's the gallows from the Halloween Carnival, she thought incredulously. Somebody from the Drama Club must have stolen it from the prop room!

"Let me go!" she pleaded frantically. "I've never done anything to you! I'm not a witch, I'm just a normal person like the rest of you!"

"That's what witches always try to tell people," Bucky said.

"Now, wait a minute," Eric protested. "This is going too far. Kyra's right, this will get us into real trouble. It's one thing to give her a scare, but this could be dangerous."

Ignoring Eric as if he didn't hear him, Danny pulled free of Debbie and came over to give Bucky assistance.

"Don't try any witchcraft on us!" Cindy shrieked. "We've taken your familiar hostage!"

She lifted her hands above her head, and, to Sarah's horror, she saw that the girl was holding Yowler.

"He's not a familiar!" Sarah cried. "He's just an ordinary cat! Kyra, tell them! There's nothing magic about Yowler!"

"He talks to you!" Danny shouted. "Bucky and I saw it! We saw you whispering together! If you give us one bit of trouble, he goes in the fire!"

Sarah felt something hard being shoved beneath her feet, and when she glanced down, she saw that it was a footstool. She felt the scratch of fiber against her throat and started to struggle, then looked across at Cindy holding Yowler high above the flames, and gave in to the hands that were looping the noose around her neck.

"Confess, witch!" Cindy screamed at her.

"I'm no more a witch than you are!" Sarah sobbed. "Let me go!"

Unexpectedly she heard those words echoed by another voice—a voice that had no business being in those surroundings.

"Let her go!" Charlie shouted. "If she slips off the stool, she'll hang herself!"

"It's Lard Ass!" somebody yelled. "What's the blubber boy doing here? Did somebody send him an invitation?"

"He goes wherever the Witch Lady goes," Debbie said. "He's one of her familiars, like the cat!"

"Or the crow!"

"Lard Ass has his own familiar!" a male voice brayed. "His familiar's a fish!"

The roar of laughter that followed reverberated through the clearing.

"Are you out of your minds?" Charlie cried. "This looks like a lynching!"

"Isn't that what they do to witches?" someone yelled.

"Charlie!" Sarah screamed in terror. "They're going to kill me!"

"Stop this!" It was Kyra again, struggling to be heard. From where Sarah stood, teetering on the footstool, she could see Kyra with Eric beside her, frantically attempting to shove their way forward through the crowd, but the group that had gathered around the gallows was packed tight.

"You've got to let her go!" Kyra shrieked. "This isn't what we planned! You promised she wouldn't be hurt! We were just going to bring her here and scare her!"

"Shut up, you wimp!" Leanne screamed back at her. "We're doing this for you!"

"No, you're not!" Kyra wailed. "I don't know why you're doing it, but it isn't for me!" Her voice was lost in the din, and a moment later she and Eric both seemed to vanish as if sucked beneath the sea of bodies by an undertow.

Charlie was still there, however, looking wide-eyed and desperate, anchored in place at the edge of the crowd by two members of the football team, each of whom had a shoulder wedged in front of him. The crowd was now writhing like the wisps of smoke that appeared in the depths of the crystal ball. Sarah realized to her amazement that they were dancing, dancing to meditation music that wasn't meant to be danced to, music that wasn't meant to be played at top volume. The ocean waves actually seemed to be crashing around them, and the sound of the oboes shrieked through the trees like wounded birds.

Sarah watched the performance with increasing horror, conscious of her precarious balance on the stool as the rope chafed the tender skin of her throat. All it would take would be for one flying foot to knock the stool out from under her, and she would be left dangling from the noose.

I've lived this before, she realized, gazing down upon the crowd and feeling the formidable energy of their excitement as it mounted in feverish anticipation of the violence to come. I've lived this experience before, but not from the gallows. In that other time I was perched upon a pair of broad shoulders, safe from any sort of harm.

"Push her!" Debbie screamed hysterically. "Push the witch off the platform! Somebody push her! That's what you do on Gallows Hill!"

"Stop!" Charlie shouted. "Can't you see what's happening? This isn't about Sarah Zoltanne, it's about you! Debbie, didn't you hear what you just called this place? You called it Gallows Hill! It's not Gallows Hill, it's Garrote Hill! Gallows Hill was in Salem!"

"Keep your mouth shut, Lard Ass, and you'll be okay," somebody told him. "You're not a witch, you're just a familiar. You're not the one we've come to the hill to punish."

Charlie managed to move back from the crowd and snatch up the tape player, adjusting the volume to a background level.

"Listen," he said, and this time his Voice suddenly had a new sound to it, a deeper, more resonant quality, as if it were the voice of a man, not a boy. "All of you listen—did you hear what I just told Debbie? Gallows Hill was in Salem. It's where innocent people were hanged over three hundred years ago! Remember what it was like, Leanne? Reach back and remember the gallows. Remember the people around you, the people who were cheering—"

"You're crazy!" Leanne cried, continuing to sway to the monotonous beat of the surf.

"I'm not crazy at all—I'm remembering, because I was there too. We were all there. Try to remember! Don't all of you remember? Reach back and try to remember—remember how scared we all were—"

"You're crazy," Leanne said again, but she seemed to be listening.

"There was a time," Charlie said, his voice going into a singsong chant, "a time when we were gathered together before. We were gathered on Gallows Hill—remember? Innocent people, don't you remember? We tried to proclaim our innocence, but nobody listened to us. The only people they would listen to were the girls—the 'afflicted children,' who accused us of being Satan's children. But we weren't Satan's children, we were good people, just like Sarah here! We never did anything to harm anybody. It was totally unfair. Misty, don't you remember—remember the trial? Remember when they said you were using voodoo to torture 'the afflicted children'?"

Misty had now stopped dancing. The crowd had grown silent and appeared to be giving Charlie their full attention.

"It wasn't my fault," Misty said in a voice that suddenly seemed to have a soft foreign accent. "Those little girls, Betty and Abigail, came into my kitchen. They wanted me to tell them stories from my life in the West Indies, to show them how to do little spells like make their hair curl. They wanted to look in a glass and see who they were going to marry. Then they started bringing their friends—that evil Ann Putnam—she was the one who planned it, she told them I conjured the devil and asked him to attack her."

"Ann isn't here now," Charlie said firmly. "Ann Putnam died long ago, and she hasn't returned. Ann has already suffered for the harm she did to you. Debbie, now it's your turn to remember. Put yourself back and remember what it was like to be standing in that church in front of the podium with the afflicted children lined up in front of you shouting accusations."

"Pointing and screaming," Debbie snarled. "They were telling vicious lies! They said my spirit was out of my body, torturing them, biting and scratching and tearing their eyes out! I wasn't doing anything. I was old and sick. I couldn't have hurt a fly. They threw me in prison—"

"And you died there," Charlie said quietly. "Your name was Sarah Osburn then, and you died there."

"I died there." Debbie started moaning. "Nobody would help me. I needed care and medicine, and nobody would help me."

From her point of elevation Sarah could see what Charlie was attempting to do. He was backing slowly across the clearing, and, without realizing what they were doing, the crowd was moving with him, following him away from the unstable footstool. He was making himself the center of attention instead of Sarah.

"Jennifer?" he called out.

"It wasn't fair!" Jennifer Albritton responded angrily. "I didn't even live in the village. My husband and I belonged to the congregation in Topsfield. We attended church in Salem because it was convenient. We were deeply religious! We had nothing to do with witchcraft!"

"None of us did," Charlie said reassuringly. "Every one of us was innocent. Try to think back and remember what it was like to be innocent yet be accused of evil we never committed!"

"I don't remember anything like that!" Cindy said, abruptly breaking the spell and tightening her grip upon Yowler, who was struggling in her grasp. "Can't you see what Lard Ass is doing? He's got all of you hypnotized! We thought he was just a familiar, but he's actually a wizard! He's using a wizard's magic to make you imagine things that couldn't possibly be true!"

"They are true!" Charlie insisted. "You were there too, Cindy. Don't you remember Dorcas? You must remember Dorcas!"

Cindy was quiet a moment, as if shocked into silence. Then she said, "Dorcas was my doll. The witch said my mother took her away and burned her."

"That's what happened in this present lifetime," Charlie said. "You named your baby doll Dorcas because somewhere deep in your subconscious you remembered a real, live Dorcas from another lifetime. In your former lifetime in Salem, Dorcas was your daughter."

"Dorcas," Cindy said softly. "Where did they take her? What did they do with my baby?"

"They convicted her of witchcraft," Charlie told her. "Just as you're doing now to Sarah."

"But she was only five years old! She was just a baby! They never even let me tell her goodbye!"

"Dorcas survived," Charlie said. They didn't hang her, Cindy. They chained her up for six months, but they didn't execute her. The witch-hunt craze was over before she could be hanged. Governor William Phips put an end to the executions and ordered the release of all the convicted witches who were still in prison."

"My baby was chained in a dungeon? For half a year?" Cindy cried, breaking out of her trance. "That's worse than hanging, that's torture! I'll never believe it—never! Lard Ass, you're a liar—a liar and a wizard and a child of Satan!" She whirled to face the others. "He's trying to cast a spell on us! He's just as bad as Sarah! They're two of a kind!"

With a shriek of rage she threw the terrified cat at Charlie's face and then hurled herself upon him, taking him by surprise so that he stumbled and fell. As if on cue, the rest of the crowd followed suit, like rabid animals suddenly released from cages. Sarah lost sight of Charlie in the furious onslaught; all Sarah could see were bodies and flying fists.